Monitoring of electrostatic fields in honeybee colonies

Abstract

All around the world honeybees are threatened by an increase in farming and its excessive use of pesticides. But how can the bees tell us about their suffering? Does the beekeeper even know that pesticides are used close by? These kinds of questions marked the beginning of the “Umweltspäher” project, “Beespy” in English. We need to listen to the bees, understand their language and enable the beekeepers to take better care of them. The use of electrostatic field recording is a logical conclusion as a way forward as it does not rely on vision, is hyper focused and less polluted by long range signals. A suitable set up was needed to record the communication of the bees in their colony. Starting from observation hive recordings, little by little a setup for recording inside an entire colony was established with constant data gathering during the process. Relevant communication behavior was extracted by classification of the data to relate to environmental impacts. The goal was to establish a model of natural behavior in a healthy colony. Furthermore, attempts were made to actively expose a colony to pesticides and monitor the resulting effect. The data of the pesticide experiments was not conclusive due to high differences in baseline activity of the observed colonies. In the beekeeper monitoring experiments it was found that moderately warm temperatures between 20 to 28 degrees and in particular the month of June showed the highest activity of waggle runs. Lower humidity increased the amount of stop signals and waggle runs whereas high humidity favored fanning behavior. Fanning was also induced by high nest temperatures and reduced by low nest temperatures. The variations in showing social behavioral signals of colonies is quite high and therefore many examples are needed to establish the social behavior distribution fingerprints. Although “Beespy” can only indicate the month and temperature so far, it is a good starting point in the understanding of honeybees on a colony level.